But then the look in Arlen’s eyes changed, as if he had come to some decision, and he gazed at her with a trust no one had ever shown her before.
“You’re gonna have to be strong and save yourself,” he said. “ ’Cause that monster’s the face of evil, and I ent gonna let it get away.”
Her fear fell away at that look, and her eyes hardened. She nodded, and felt the mind demon’s sudden start, taking Arlen’s meaning the same moment she did. It tried to react, but it was not quick enough as Arlen struck a blow to its head that lit the darkness with magic.
The demon’s presence in her mind vanished, leaving Renna stunned and disoriented. She glanced at the mimic, still in her form, and saw it stagger similarly, cut off from its mind.
Tightening her grip on her father’s knife, Renna growled and leapt at the creature, putting the blade into its bare midriff. She put her free arm around the demon, pulling it in close as the blackstem wards on her skin activated. Magic shocked through her muscles, filling her with strength as she heaved the knife upward, opening up the creature from navel to collar.
The mimic’s body may have looked like her on the outside, but the black, stinking ichor that burst from the wound was nothing from the surface world.
She looked at its face, the same face she had seen a thousand times in the surface of water. Renna was almost brought to tears by the pain and confusion in her own eyes, but then the face snarled like a dog, and its teeth began to elongate as it hissed at her.
Renna twisted as the mimic lunged, turning its own energy against it as Arlen had taught her. She grabbed its thick braid in her free hand as it passed, pulling it up short from its fall and baring its nape. The move gave such power to her pivot and slash that her knife passed through its neck effortlessly.
Just like that, the fight was over. The demon’s body fell to the ground lifelessly, and she was left holding her own head by the hair, eyes rolled back and black ichor dripping from the neck. She inhaled, taking what seemed like her first breath in hours.
She looked up, expecting to see the mind demon dead at Arlen’s feet, but instead she saw Arlen surrounded by wood demons holding branches in their claws, and the mind demon backing away. The corelings took no notice of her yet, focused solely on Arlen.
Renna looked around, dropping the head to the ground as she snatched up her warded cloak. The mimic had torn the ties at its throat, but the garment was otherwise intact. Sheathing her knife, she flung the cloak around her shoulders, putting up the hood and using both hands to hold it closed from the inside.
She rose carefully, walking toward the battle scene at a slow, even pace to allow the wards their greatest advantage. One of the wood demons struck Arlen across the shoulders as she drew close to him. He cried out and was knocked to the ground, spitting blood. The other demons followed suit, and he rolled desperately to avoid their blows, with only partial success.
She wanted nothing more than to rush to Arlen’s aid, but she knew in her heart that he would not want her to. The mind demon stood boldly again, no longer trying to escape. It would be worth more than both their lives, if she could show it the sun.
The Painted Man felt his ribs snap as the branch struck him to the ground. He heaved up a foul mix of bile and blood and spit it into the dirt.
Before he could recover, another branch struck him. He rolled to dodge the third, and the fourth, but he could not regain his footing to rise, and the fifth struck him full in the face, tearing skin and popping one of his eyes from its socket to hang from a string of muscle. The sound of the blow echoed in his head, drowning out all else.
With his one good eye, he looked up, seeing several demons swinging branches at once. For a moment he thought it was his time to die, but then his senses returned for a split second and he cursed himself for a fool.
As the branches came down, they struck only mist. The Painted Man slipped from the center of the copse, reforming behind one of the wood demons, his wounds healed instantly. He kicked out one of the demon’s legs, grabbing it by the horns as it fell and using its own weight to flip it over and break its neck. He leapt at the next demon, putting his thumbs through its eyes. A third demon swung its branch at him, but again he dematerialized, and it struck only its blind brother. The Painted Man solidified again, stabbing his stiffened fingers through a crevice in the attacking demon’s barklike armor and bursting its heart like a popping chestnut.
He had known no mortal weapon could harm him if he saw its approach, but now he realized it was much more than that. Anything short of death or dismemberment could be healed in an instant. The corelings around him had become nothing but flies to swat from his path. They weren’t smart enough to dematerialize offensively on their own, and the mind demon would be wary to do it through them, lest it meet his will on that other plane.
He ignored the remaining wood demons, passing through them like a ghost and only solidifying when the path to the coreling prince was clear. He looked at the demon, and a wave of dizziness overcame him. The confidence that had suffused him a moment earlier vanished as he realized he was only just discovering powers the demon had known for thousands of years. It bared its fangs and lifted a talon to draw a ward in the air.
But then the tip of a blade burst from its chest, flaring bright with magic. The dizziness left him as Renna’s cloak fell away and he saw her holding the demon around the throat with her free arm while the contact wards along her blade built in power.
The coreling prince shrieked in surprise and pain, and the Painted Man did not hesitate, leaping forward to strike hard blows to keep it off balance. Renna let go her knife, whipping her brook stone necklace around its throat. The wards flared, and the mind demon opened its mouth as if to scream, but no sound came out. Instead, its cranium pulsed, and the resulting thrum struck the Painted Man like a harsh wind, knocking him back.
Renna seemed not to notice the effect, but all through the trees and seemingly for miles around, demons shrieked in agony. A wind demon dropped from the sky, crashing through the branches of a tree to hit the leaf bed, dead. The wood demons that had attacked him likewise collapsed, killed by the demon’s psychic scream.
And in that instant, the mind demon fled.
The coreling prince had never known fear. Never known pain. It was above such things, tasting them only vicariously through the minds of its drones or its prey—delicacies to be savored.
But there was nothing vicarious about the death of its mimic or the blade in its chest. The choking cord around its throat and the blows that scattered its attempts to assert its power. It screamed, and felt the minds of drones all around burn out from the pain.
The one was distracted for an instant, and the coreling prince took the chance, dematerializing and fleeing for the Core. There it would bond a new mimic and grow strong for the next cycle, when it would return with a host of drones the likes of which the surface had not seen in millennia.
Renna shrieked, and the Painted Man whirled back to see the mind demon melt away from her grasp, breaking into mist that fled down a nearby path to the Core.
Instinctively, he followed.
“Arlen, no!” Renna screamed, but it was a distant thing.
The path to the Core was like following a brook upstream in the dark. He could feel the path, but sight had no meaning on the path to the Core. He simply felt the flow of magic stemming from the center of the world and followed back against the current. The Painted Man kept his will focused on the evil taint of the coreling prince ahead of him, and it seemed they raced for miles before he drew close enough to grab at the demon.
He had no hands with which to grab, but he willed his essence to latch on to the demon, and like two men blowing smoke into the same cloud, they mingled and their wills clashed.
The Painted Man had expected the demon’s will to have weakened, but it was no less potent now, and they clawed through each other’s minds, jabbing fingers into any delicate crevice they could find. The coreling prince laid
bare all his life’s failures, mocking him with the fate he had abandoned Renna to, or brought upon the Rizonans. Teasing him with images of Jardir forcing himself upon poor innocent Leesha.
It was almost too much, but in his pain he lashed out, cracking through the mind demon’s own defenses. He saw in that moment a glimpse of the Core, a place of eternal darkness, but lit with magic’s glow more brightly than the desert wastes.
Instantly the demon’s will retreated, ceasing its attack to protect its own thoughts. The Painted Man sensed the advantage and pressed his assault. The coreling prince shrieked in his mind as he learned of the Hive.
The Painted Man might have won then, if not for the horror of the sight. The corelings that came to the surface to hunt were but the barest fraction of what the Core could spew forth. Millions of demons. Billions. For the first time since he had found the wards of old, he despaired that they could ever be defeated.
The mind demon’s will roared over him, and their struggle fell to a more basic level, the simple will to survive. But here the Painted Man held the advantage, for he had no fear of death, and did not look over his shoulder as it approached them both.
The demon did, and in that instant its will broke, and the Painted Man absorbed its magic into his own essence, leaving a burnt remain he threw from the path to the Core to scatter away forever.
Alone on the path, the Painted Man could finally hear the true call of the Core, and it was beautiful. There was power there. Power not evil in itself. Like fire, it was beyond good or evil. It was simply power, and it beckoned him like a teat to a hungry infant. He reached for it, ready to taste.
But then another call reached him.
“Arlen!” The voice was a distant echo that reverberated down the path.
“Arlen Bales, you come back to me!”
Arlen Bales. A name he hadn’t used in years. Arlen Bales had died out on the Krasian Desert. The voice was calling a ghost. He turned back to the Core, ready to embrace it.
“Don’t you leave me again, Arlen Bales!”
Renna. He ’d left her in dire straights twice now, but the third would be the deepest cut, damning her to the very life he sought to escape after she had worked so hard to save his.
What could the embrace of the Core offer that hers could not?
Renna’s throat was hoarse from screaming when the mist seeped back up from the ground and began to take Arlen’s form. She laughed through her tears and nearly choked. It seemed only a moment ago that he was as good as cored and she expecting no better, but now suddenly every demon in the area was dead, the night hauntingly quiet as she and Arlen stared at each other. The mind demon’s magic feedback had been intense, and Renna’s senses felt more alive than they ever had in her life. She practically crackled with energy, and her heart was pounding like a Jongleur’s hand drums. Arlen glowed so intensely he hurt to look at.
“Dancer,” Arlen breathed suddenly, breaking the silence. He ran to his horse.
“Broke a lot of bones,” Renna said sadly. “Ent never gonna run again, even if he makes it through. Da would say to put him down.”
“To the Core with anything your da would have done!” Arlen growled. Renna felt his pain like a slap in the face, and knew in that moment how much he loved the horse. She knew what it was like, when an animal was your only friend in the world. She wished he could love her half so much.
“Wounds’ve stopped bleeding,” she noted. “Must’ve taken some magic off that changing demon before he was struck.”
“Mimic,” Arlen said. “They’re called mimics.”
“How d’you know?” Renna asked.
“Learned a lot, when I touched the coreling prince’s mind,” Arlen said. He reached out, gripping one of the stallion’s broken legs and pulling the bones straight. Holding them in place with one powerful hand, he drew a ward in the air with the other.
He grunted in pain, but the ward flared and the bones knit before her eyes. One by one, Arlen tended the horse’s wounds, but as Twilight Dancer began to breathe comfortably, Arlen’s own breath began to labor. His magic, so bright a moment ago, was dimming rapidly. Already it was darker than she had ever seen it.
She touched his shoulder, and felt a flash of pain as some of her own magic flowed into him. He gasped and looked up at her.
“Enough,” she whispered, and he nodded.
The Painted Man looked at Renna and felt a profound sense of guilt.
“I’m sorry, Ren,” he said.
Renna looked at him curiously. “Sorry for what?”
“Turned my back on you once when we were young, leaving you to Harl so I could chase demons,” he said. “And then tonight, I did it again.”
But Renna shook her head. “Felt that demon in my head. Felt it slither into me worse ’n Da ever could. It was pure evil, straight from the Core. Killing that monster was worth more ’n a thousand Renna Tanners.”
The Painted Man reached out and touched her cheek, his eyes unreadable.
“Thought so before,” he said, “but now I ent so sure.”
“I ent takin’ back my promise,” Renna said. “If this is your life, then I aim to support it like a proper wife should. No matter what.”
Dawn was approaching, and the Core called to the Painted Man still, but it was a distant thing now, easily ignored. Because of her. Because with Renna he finally remembered who he was. The words came easily to him.
“I, Arlen Bales, promise myself to you, Renna Tanner.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Desert Spear is by far the longest and most challenging work I’ve ever attempted. Weaving eight active POV characters into a cohesive story stretched my feeble mind quite thin, and I could not have managed it without the support of my friends and family and, most of all, my test readers, who took the time to read the book in its early stages and offer the criticism and advice that helped evolve it into the story you hold in your hands. Thank you to: Myke, Matt, Dani, Stacy, Amelia, Jay, Mom, Denise, Cobie, Jon, Nancy, Sue, my agent Joshua, my editors Anne & Emma, my copy editor Laura, my international publishers & translators, and all the fans of the first book who took the time to write to me and give me encouragement as I struggled to make The Desert Spear my best work even as the rest of my life was turning upside down with a new baby and career. Thank you, all. You mean the world to me.
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The Desert Spear (demon) Page 73